Faith
seeks intelligence in order that light might meet light. The Scottish divine and
writer, George MacDonald, whom C. S. Lewis so much admired, gave a sermon in the
latter part of the last century entitled simply "Light." He suggested
that we must first become "fit" for what we are to receive and have,
but that our nature will indeed be completed. MacDonald, in a most beautiful
passage, reminded us:

There are good things God must delay giving until His child has a pocket to
hold them—till he gets His child to make that pocket. He must first make him
fit to receive and to have. There is no part of our nature that shall not be
satisfied and that not by lessening it, but by enlarging it to embrace an
ever-enlarging enough.1

Faith seeks intelligence in order to understand and be able to accept that we
are given more than we can expect. We must also make ourselves ready for what we
are and will receive. One of the good things God delays giving us is precisely
Himself. Our individual lives, their narrative history, is the account of what
we do with this delay, of what we do to prepare ourselves for the
"ever-enlarging enough."

In Evelyn Waugh's autobiography, appropriately named for our purposes, <A
Little Learning>, he included a chapter entitled, "A Brief History of My
Religious Opinions," a chapter that hints at just why "a little
learning" in its classical statement in precisely "a dangerous
thing." Waugh began by citing a passage of 18 June 1921, from his own
diary. He gravely wrote—he was all of eighteen at the time—that "in the
last few weeks I have ceased to be a Christian. I have realized that for the
last two terms at least I have been an atheist in all except the courage to
admit it myself."2 When he wrote this self-confession, Waugh was in his
last year at Lancing, an Anglican prep boarding school in the South of England.
He went up Oxford the following year.

In spite of his newly-found school atheism, however—he had gone to Lancing
as a rather pious young man—Waugh still enjoyed being a sacristan at the
school chapel. He even had a sort of atheist scruple about the impropriety of it
all, a scruple prompted by his friend Drieburg who told him frankly that an
atheist had no business "handling the altar cloths." So Waugh, with
some atheist illogic, decided to consult the school chaplain about the matter.
When Waugh arrived at his quarters, the chaplain and another master were just
sitting down to have a smoke. With some embarrassment, he had to explain his
strange perplexity to both chaplain and master. After soberly listening to his
curious anguish—"adolescent doubts are very tedious to the mature,"
Waugh admitted—the two masters "genially assured" him that "it
was quite in order for an atheist to act as a sacristan."

At the same time, Waugh had belonged to a school debating society called the
"Dilettanti." During his last two years at Lancing, he found himself
"eager to dispute the intellectual foundations of Christianity." The
subjects of these school debates, he recalled with some amusement, were such
propositions as these: " 'Resolved: This House does not believe in the
immortality of the soul'; 'This House believes the age of institutional religion
is over'; 'This House cannot reconcile divine omniscience with human freewill',
and so forth."3 One wonders, on looking at this list, whether a school
system that encourages such debates or one which ignores them is the more
unhealthy one.

What is of interest to note about Waugh's account of his youthful atheism and
doubts, however, was the state of soul that resulted from them. He tells us:
"I suffered no sense of loss in discarding the creed of my upbringing;
still less of exhilaration. My diary is full of pagan gloom and the
consideration of suicide."4 Gloom, boredom, and suicide ironically seem,
more often than not in intellectual history, to be the results of losing the joy
that Christianity maintains itself ultimately to be. Indeed, it was into a world
of gloom, boredom, and suicide that Christianity was first born in the Roman
Empire; hence we have the abiding of the importance of Roman stoicism, cynicism,
and epicureanism as well as of the insufficiency of their sober virtues.

These classic questions, which it is the function of faith and intelligence
to ponder even from the beginning of our intellectual and spiritual lives (even
in school debating societies) are, to be sure, ones that can make an atheist out
of a Christian, or, equally often, a Christian out of an atheist. This
possibility leads us to suspect that our relation to God and to truth is not
merely intellectual, however much it is indeed intellectual. The immortality of
the soul, after all, was advocated by no one less than Plato, hardly a
Christian, except perhaps "naturaliter," as many of his admirers
ancient and modern have held. Meantime, at least some institutional religion
persists in all ages, in spite of all academic predictions or Gates of Hell
prevailing to the contrary. Divine omniscience and freewill are questions an
Aquinas, for instance, with perhaps a little more perception than the Dilettanti
Debating Society in 1921, found non-contradictory and therefore theoretically
quite compatible with each other. We could not even think of divine omniscience
without its including a freewill that was really free.

The famous "dicta" that "faith seeks understanding" and
that "understanding seeks faith" are ideas that go back at least to
St. Augustine and St. Anselm, if not to Plato himself. Aristotle, in a
remarkably fertile phrase, had said that the human mind has a capacity to know
or to "be" all things. All that is. Aristotle had noted that if man
were the highest being, politics would be the highest science; but, he added,
that man is not the highest being so that he stands to the highest being as a
"contemplative," that is, as someone who must receive or behold what
is not his to make or create. This conclusion is ultimately the real source of
human freedom.

Aquinas also had argued that since we can in some essential fashion prove
that God exists but not what He is like, not what His inner life consists in, we
nevertheless continue to seek to know about God in His fullness. However little
we can know about this First Being, Aristotle told us at the end of <The
Ethics>, it remains worth all our efforts even in comparison to the
admittedly important things of this world. We are curious about what this
conclusion about God's existence means. We cannot really let it go and remain
consistent with ourselves, with our desire to know <what is>. For it leads
our minds to establish the fact that finite being, including our own, whose
limits we self-reflectively are aware of, is not and cannot be the cause of
itself, even though, as we read in the <Book of Genesis>, we might be
tempted to make ourselves, not God, the cause of the distinction of good and
evil in the world.

Eric Voegelin, in a most provocative lecture he gave in Montreal in 1980, to
young university students, told them that they must be open to something beyond
themselves because "we all experience our own existence as not existing out
of itself but as coming from somewhere even if we don't know where."5 We
should, furthermore, be aware that such a vital question concerning our own
being will in all probability not be formally asked in any university of our
immediate acquaintance. This fact is no doubt at the origin of the intellectual
malaise and spiritual emptiness many of our friends and acquaintances find in
themselves. Even though the pursuit of truth must in some sense depend on those
who have been wise before us, and these not always the recognized
"great" thinkers, it has almost become a private, not corporate,
academic, or even religious enterprise for most of us.

Allan Bloom caused quite a scandal in recent years by suggesting that the
unhappiest souls in our society are not those of the ghetto dwellers, or the
dope addicts or peddlers, or even of the craftsmen, the businessman, the poet,
or politician, if I might hint at the characters in <The Apology of
Socrates.> Rather the unhappiest souls belong to those students in the twenty
or thirty "best" universities, where they pay twenty-five thousand a
year to attend and consequently assume they have entered onto the paths of
worldly accomplishments and intellectual glory, only to be taught and too often
themselves to believe that everything is quite relative and that there is no
truth. The reason these particular souls are the "unhappiest" is the
same reason Plato gave, namely, that the potential philosophers both encountered
and chose a good that was less than what it is that could satisfy the being they
were given. The real drama in each of our lives remains what Plato said it was:
which good will we choose in a world where there really are differing goods and
definite vices?

In a recent interview, Bloom was asked whether he could really fault the
universities for this situation? He replied:

I do partly blame the universities. One of the reasons for students' not
reading seriously is their belief that they can't learn important things from
books. They believe books are just ideologies, mythologies or political tools of
different parties. If the peaks of learning offered some shining goal in the
distance, it would be very attractive to an awful lot of people—people with
very diverse backgrounds. The golden thread of all education is in the first
questions: How should I live? What's the good life? What can I hope for? What
must I do? What would be the terrible consequence if we knew the truth?6

Bloom did not specifically mention, though there is no reason to think he was
hostile to it, the question of "whether God has communicated to men
anything either to know or to do?" The very fact that we experience
ourselves reflectively as receivers of our own limited existences requires that
we at least ask the question of the source of our particular being; for we
cannot, and still remain authentic to ourselves, close it off as if the answer
were not the most significant truth we must know about ourselves.

E. F. Schumacher, in his wonderful book, <A Guide for the Perplexed,>
wrote in a similar vein. In recounting his own university days at Oxford, he
discovered there that he was in a similar situation to Moses Maimonides, who
wrote the original book entitled "A Guide for the Perplexed." For the
pious Jew or Muslim or Christian of the Middle Ages, intellectual perplexity was
caused by the sudden eruption of Plato, Aristotle, and the post-Aristotelians
into his seemingly complete religious life and culture. How was it that Plato
and Aristotle knew so much compared to Scripture? What was it that Scripture
knew that Plato and Aristotle did not? Were at least some of the things found
both in the philosophers and the prophets the same? How could this be possible?
As Maimonides and Aquinas and Avicenna sorted it all out, they wanted to know
what was the relation of the teachings and practices of revelation to the
analyses of Plato and Aristotle who stood for them, as they still stand for us,
as the best in human wisdom itself?

For Schumacher, however, the perplexity of the modern student arose from
another source.

All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge
on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about
and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct
of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete;
and no interpreter had come along to help me.7

He finally began to understand that the very nature of modern science, itself
the heart of society and of the university, itself a product of western
intellectual history, methodologically excluded the most important questions
that concern any human being.

The heart and mind, consequently, will remain empty especially at the highest
and best of academic institutions because such education simply will not deal,
as it could and should, with what is most important to know and to do. Anyone
who completes a modern academic degree thinking he has a full heart will not
have any idea about what his own heart is about. As Schumacher realized, to find
the truth we must look elsewhere. We must again look at the classics. We must
again look at the mystics and the metaphysicians. John Senior wrote in this
regard something that is very true which will yet seem so mysterious to most of
us:

The greatest contribution to the restoration of order in all human society
would be the founding in every city, town, and rural region, of communities of
contemplative religious committed to the life of consecrated silence, so that
silence would be present to our works and days . . . to judge and measure all
our noisy accomplishments.8

The contemplation of our own accomplishments reveals their grandeur but also
their limits. We are a generation desperately in need of the freedom of limits.

Not too long ago, I received a letter from a friend who had just arrived at a
teaching position on a university campus, in Virginia, in fact. Since a new
professor is not easily recognized in such exalted status at least until classes
begin, my friend could go about, as she put it, "incognito." Shades of
Waugh at Lancing in 1921, she heard even today, that "religion is the same
as superstition." But what seemed to be the most "amazing" theme
was this, that "it is dangerous to have high moral standards because, if
you do, then you will impose them on others (and this is dangerous and bad), so,
therefore, you ought to have low standards." However much we are all
sinners according to our religious traditions, vice and mediocrity are in the
academic air as democratic and intellectually respectable.

Needless to say, for anyone familiar with a C. S. Lewis, such a viewpoint is
nothing but a central strand of popular modern social and philosophic theory
carried to its logical conclusion on a famous campus in Virginia or anywhere
else. The "cause" of corruption, in such a view, is the good. The only
truth is that there can be no claim to truth, no claim, that is, that might be
spoken to others with authority and with earnestness. Therefore, any good must
be subjective. It is impossible to distinguish one good and another. All
activities and all thoughts in themselves are of equal weight even if they are
contradictory to one another, even if they are dangerous. The low and the high
are the same things. It makes no difference what we do just so long as what we
do has no influence on any one else. We have all, in a famous phrase from
Machiavelli, "lowered our sights" because the good is too good for any
of us. The "modern project" in Leo Strauss's phrase is complete. We
allow nothing that has an origin outside of ourselves.

I mentioned C. S. Lewis in this context because however much we might be
subject to such views, however much we run across them in books, in classes, in
the media, or in our lives, we suspect that they cannot bear final examination.
Lewis wrote that there are two points to keep in mind:

First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that
they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.
Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of
Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking
about ourselves and the universe we live in.9

Why does understanding seek faith? Precisely to explain why we try to justify
these lowered sights, to think clearly about these things we cannot really get
rid of if we reflect on ourselves. Why does faith seek understanding? Because it
must know these facts, that there is a law, that we break it.

In her penetrating essay, "Creed or Chaos," which she wrote in
1949, Dorothy Sayers spoke of running into a young and intelligent priest. The
priest told her that one of the most hopeful signs in the world was the growing
pessimism with which many of us viewed human nature. In these days in which even
the President has decided that we must actually war against drug czars, not
Communist ones, that we may be destroyed by drugs before we are overcome by
ideology, these words seem even more pertinent. "There is a great deal of
truth in what (the priest) says," Dorothy Sayers reflected.

The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and
stupidity of human behavior at this time are those who think highly of <homo
sapiens> as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic
belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the
appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the totalitarian states, and the
obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of capitalist society, are not merely
shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of
everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped
out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and
they feel as if the whole world had gone mad together.10

If it is best that we lower our sights lest we imply that there really is
something objectively good for ourselves and for others; if finally the world we
thought we wanted turns out to be a world that somehow seems to have gone
"mad," then we must begin to suspect the theories on which this world
is built.

Why does understanding seek faith? It is because understanding does not
succeed in explaining what it sets out to understand. Things actually happen and
take place that do not explain themselves. There seems to be a constant
diversity between the theories of modernity, which are based upon the autonomy
of the human intellect that admits no knowledge but what proceeds from human
will, and the kinds of things that actually happen to which our minds as
original sources ought to be open. In other words, the troubled searching but
never finding, which is characteristic of modern thought, the fear of finding
out that something indeed arises outside of ourselves that we ought to do and
hold, something that would require our change of hearts, leave their own
empirical records in the lives and thoughts of our kind.

As this record becomes more and more negative, we begin to realize that the
conditions of society and of soul are more accurately described by, say, Paul's
<Epistle to the Romans>, or Augustine's <City of God>, or Plato's
<Laws>, than by what we are taught in the best universities, where we do
little study of Paul or Augustine or even Plato because they find in things a
right order. We are not academically allowed to suspect that these sources might
indeed contain answers to our real problems. And if they do, we must wonder how
is it that such a source can know more about ourselves than we, apparently the
best of our kind, know about ourselves?

Why does faith seek intelligence? Lucy and Charlie Brown are talking over the
stone fence. Charlie is clearly pretty bothered and down-in-the-mouth. Lucy with
some uncharacteristic sympathy asks him, "Discouraged again, eh, Charlie
Brown?" Charlie brightens up a bit at this show of interest as both he and
Lucy gaze distantly over the fence. She continues, "You know what your
trouble is? The whole trouble with you is that you're you!" Immediately,
Charlie turns about, somewhat annoyed, to face Lucy, "Well, what in the
world can I do about that?" Finally, he simply stares at her when Lucy
responds coolly, "I don't pretend to be able to give advice. . . . I merely
point out the trouble."11

The trouble, in other words, lies somehow not in our institutions, even
though they can be better or worse as Aristotle understood, nor in the structure
of the world, nor in the skies. The trouble lies in ourselves, in our freedom.
No one tells us this except orthodox religion and the philosophy developed in an
effort to explain it. In Sigrid Undset's biography of St. Catherine of Siena, we
read: "Catherine's opinion was that politics are never anything but the
product of a person's religious life."12 The condition of our souls is
anterior to the condition of our polities.

G. K. Chesterton once noticed an invitation in one of the London papers
inviting general response to the set question: "What's wrong with the
world?" Chesterton immediately sat down and wrote a letter to the Editor in
which he replied quite briefly: "Dear Sir: What's wrong with the world? I
am. Signed, G. K. Chesterton." One of the main reasons faith seeks
understanding is because from faith we learn that we are somehow fallen, that
there is some disorder in our lives which we experience and need to account for
but for which we have no apparent explanation. That there is something wrong is
not merely a proposition of revelation. Aristotle himself often noted that man
left to himself was the worst of the animals. No one gives a more graphic
description of human corruption than a Plato. These classic philosophers knew
that we were fallen, but they did not know of The Fall.

So faith seeks understanding. We have all encountered the young man or young
woman, even the old professor, who informs us that he does not believe in God
because of well, how could there be a God with all the poverty and pain and evil
in the world? If we know of the Book of Job, of course, we are already prepared
somewhat for the fact that what God ultimately requires of us is not the
elimination of poverty or pain but obedience to his Will. Even those who are
poor, even those who suffer, even those who are humiliated can reach that
purpose for which each was primarily created. Some indeed think they can do so
easier than those who are rich, intelligent, and well-made. The harlots and
publicans evidently go first into the kingdom of God, a hard saying for us all.
But what about it? Could we not have had a better universe, one in which pain
and evil were eliminated? Isn't God responsible for the mess we are in? Of
course, we know that other worlds are quite possible. We know about
<Perelandra> and the "Silent Planet." The question that more
directly concerns us, however, is whether we ourselves are possible in other
worlds? And if not, do we have any reason for rejoicing in this one?

After all, some strange congruities are before us. In spite of the fact that
there is so much disorder in ourselves and in the world against which the
enlightened mind rebels as if it were not its own fault or concern, some things
do seem to belong together. If it is a mystery about why there is pain or evil,
a much more subtle mystery persists over the question of why there is joy than
over why there is pain and evil.

Hillarie Belloc once wrote a perfectly wonderful novel, or perhaps an
allegory of himself, called <The Four Men>, about Sussex, the heart of
England, of what happened on a walk on Halloween, and All Hallows' Day, and All
Souls' Day in 1902. On All Saints' Day, All Hallows' Day, the Four Men found an
old inn "brilliantly lighted," with small square panes and red
curtains. They entered the inn, into a "pleasant bar" which opened out
into a large room where about fifteen or twenty men were assembled to drink and
sing.

Belloc continued:

Their meal was long done, but we ordered ours, which was of such excellence
in the way of eggs and bacon as we had none of us until that moment thought
possible upon this side of the grave. The cheese also, of which I have spoken,
was put before us, and the new cottage loaves, so that this feast, unlike any
other feast that yet was since the beginning of the world, exactly answered to
all that the heart had expected of it, and we were contented and were filled.13

How is it, we wonder, that we are so made that the things that content us are
actually found in this world? How are we to understand this? Can it be an
accident? Did the eggs and the bacon and the cheese and the inn and the appetite
all just happen? Or are we indeed made for these things and are they made for
us, even when, like the cheeses, we make them ourselves?

Faith seeks understanding because we are "fit to receive and to
have" such things, as George MacDonald implied. Yet, we must make ourselves
ready to receive them. How is it that we are content and filled in anything?
Must this completion be seen in the light of our experience that we did not
cause ourselves either to be or to be human beings? We could never have guessed
that things actually fit together. C. S. Lewis, in his usual way, put it well:

Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one
of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have
guessed. . . . What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is
obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like
ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that
face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has
gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The
other is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two
equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the
other bad, and that this universe is a battlefield in which they fight out an
endless war.14

This universe we could not have guessed, yet it exists. Faith teaches which
of these understandings is the correct one, either the good world in which
something, something we find in ourselves, has gone wrong, or the endless war of
the worlds.

But if something has gone wrong, some way to make it right is to be sought.
Yet if there is a way to correct what is wrong, will we recognize it? And will
it be the way we expected? Will we be among those who did not believe that any
good could come out of Nazareth, because well, where is this Nazareth anyhow?
This Incarnation is not the way to repair a world, this baptism, this greater
love than this, this body and blood. These ways are, as Paul said of the
philosophic Greeks, intellectual scandals. We need something practical, some
plan. Yet we still find a Karol Wojtyla calmly telling a group of evidently
hesitant bishops, in this case American ones:

We are the guardians of something given, and given to the Church universal,
something which is not the result of reflection, however competent, on cultural
and social questions of the day, and is not merely the best path among many, but
the one and only path to salvation.15

At the same time, present in the world is a promise of personal salvation and
a way to it that does not depend on anything arising from society, politics, or
philosophy.

Samuel Johnson, in his famous trip to the Hebrides in 1774, told of stopping
in October at the Island of Ulva, near which was a small adjacent island called
Staffa, about which a famous book had been recently written, but concerning
which tome no one on the island seemed to know anything. Johnson continued:

When the islanders were reproached for their ignorance, or insensitivity of
the wonders of Staffa, they had not much to reply. They had indeed considered it
little, because they had always seen it; and none but philosophers, nor they
always, are struck with wonder, otherwise than by novelty.16

That we initially are struck by wonder, not need or want, was for Aristotle
the foundation of all thought pursued for its own sake. But that we be struck
even beyond the ordinary wonder, this was the classic purpose of miracles, of
our being called specially to attend to certain events that we might otherwise
not notice because, like the islanders on Ulva, we had always seen them.

Why does faith seek understanding? In modern cosmological speculation a fear
has been prevalent that we would not find other intelligent life in the
universe. We have now explored the last of the Planets of our own solar system.
We can see pretty clearly that in this system we are quite alone. Neither radio
astronomy nor space exploration has given us any indication that there is
anything but us. To be sure, we read statistics showing that there are so many
billions of stars in the universe that surely there must be, by the law of
averages, other beings like unto ourselves. Other studies, however, hint that
the specificity required that human life exist in the universe is so unlikely
and rare that is begins to look like the formation of man was the very purpose
of the universe.17 The discovery of only ourselves is anything but exhilarating
for many, for if we are meant to be in some sense, then we have a purpose that
is not entirely a product of our own will or intellect.

No doubt mankind has some mission toward the physical universe. Even on
earth, however, there begin to be Hegelian type philosophers who now despair
because evidently western liberalism has won the great battles and proved the
ideologies designed to reorganize the world to be merely the tyrannies they are.
Some find solace in the wars of religion that still rage on the planet, the
Middle East, perhaps, because there at least something ultimate still seems at
stake. But in essence intellectuals with a this-worldly perspective begin to
speak a new kind of despair. <The Wall Street Journal> took pains to note
the theories of Francis Fukuyama who has been attracting attention with this
"end of history," thesis, so reminiscent of Nietzsche. Fukuyama
"thinks that democratic liberalism has triumphed (a good thing), that
ideologies are disappearing (also good, he feels), but that the new order may
bring on 'centuries of boredom'."18

This thesis of boredom is, after all, not unlike the "gloom" that
Waugh on losing his faith experienced as a young man in England after World War
I. And indeed it probably stems from the same source. Faith seeks understanding.
Let us suppose it is true, for the sake of argument, that the ideologies are
dead. Voegelin had already stressed this fact:

We have, since the mid-and late nineteenth century, since Comte, Marx, John
Stuart Mill, Bakunin (and so on), no new ideologist. All ideologies belong, in
their origin, before that period; there are no new ideologies in the twentieth
century.19

If the twentieth century has exhausted the ideologies allowing them to work
themselves out in practice so that we can see their results, it does not follow
that liberalism itself is not one of these ideologies, one of the successful
ones. The fact, if it is a fact, that it has won, does not mean that it is not
itself a man-made theoretical construct that is itself reductionist, itself
cutting man off from the true ends and issues for which he is made.

In the revelational tradition, the purpose of the world is not some sort of
perfect world order, nor is it a kind of unlimited freedom to do whatever we
wish, though we may seek both. Rather the world is a place of trial, a vale of
tears, if you will. This does not deny that there may indeed be some kind of
inner-worldly mission for mankind. But the drama of history and individual being
relates directly to the ground of being, to God. The world exists for something
other than itself. It exists in order that we might have time and space in which
to choose what it is we are about. The drama of existence remains in the human
heart; and the configurations of the world, its political and social orders, are
merely, as Plato and Aristotle saw, reflections of these choices.

If faith seeks intelligence, as it does, it is to understand how the world
might be seen as an arena for the action of God and the actions of men such that
the very purpose of the world is achieved in the final actions of men with
regard to that insufficiency that defines their very being. St. Thomas asked the
question of whether the world was created in justice or mercy. He answered that
it was created in mercy because it did not presuppose anything that God
"had" to do. The order of the world, its diversities, inequalities,
its vastness of time and space, are themselves good. We do not suffer any
injustice in our being what we are. If our existence as such is not
"unjust," then it follows that it must come about from a source beyond
justice. What is beyond justice is gift and generosity and love. If this is the
source of our being, if this is what faith teaches intelligence, then we can
begin to understand ourselves in a more lightsome way.

Josef Pieper, in conclusion, remarked that "Christian doctrine is
primarily concerned with the doctrine of salvation, not with interpreting
reality or human existence. But it implies as well certain fundamental teachings
on specific philosophic matters—the world and existence as such."20 Faith
seeks intelligence because it knows that all things do fit together, that
nothing will be "true" and contradict the particular path of our
salvation that is founded in faith. It is not just any way, but "the
Way," as the early Christians said of themselves.

When George MacDonald remarked "that there is no part of our nature that
shall not be satisfied," he intended to include our intelligence. St.
Thomas insisted, therefore, that the primary locus and act of precisely the
beatific vision, of our final receiving of God as our end, was not found in our
will by which we loved God but in our intellect in which we knew Him as He is,
face to face, to use Paul's striking phrase.

We should, like the young Waugh, I think, be "eager to dispute the
intellectual foundations of Christianity." If we dispute with that openness
to all truth and to all sources which Christianity insists to be required for
its intellectual integrity, not reducing our attention by method or prejudice or
bad will or corrupt lives, we will discover, much to our astonishment, that
there are indeed intellectual foundations to this faith. We will not, for the
most part, find these in the universities or in the culture except incidentally,
in obscure books and in holy lives, in "consecrated silence," in our
concern about the gloom and boredom into which the culture by its own confession
seems to be experiencing.

We will continue to be, like E. F. Schumacher, perplexed that the ultimate
questions are never even mentioned or if mentioned, never given a fair hearing.
Yet, there is Belloc, the suspicion that there are feasts unlike any other
feasts since the beginning of the world that are exactly answers to what our
heart might expect. There are strange incongruities that we will encounter that
no system will explain to us. Is it, to recall Lewis' alternative, a good world
that has gone wrong or an eternal battlefield in which endless wars are fought
in our fields or in our hearts?

When we think of these things are we, unlike the islanders of Staffa whom
Johnson encountered, struck with the novelty of it all, struck enough to wonder
as philosophers should about that "something that is not the product of
human reflection," something not just the best path but the only path? Let
us indeed like Waugh give a "brief history of our own religious
opinions" to see what it is we are incited to think because of our faith.
We can indeed remain atheists even in the sacristy. Belief is both a gift and a
choice. But we all have the experience that our own existence "does not
exist out of itself." We should not be either overly surprised or overly
sad about the sad hearts in the best schools. Both the Greeks like Aeschylus and
just men of the Old Testament like Job knew that man learns by suffering.

As Lucy told Charlie Brown, "the whole trouble is that you're you."
Or to recall Chesterton's answer to the question, "What's wrong with the
world?"—"I am." This is the location of what is wrong and of
what is the whole trouble. This is why Christianity is first a doctrine of
salvation, because this is what we know about ourselves, about our finiteness
and about our actions. Yet, this is a good world in which something has gone
wrong, often something to which we ourselves have contributed. The world was
created in mercy, not justice.

There are indeed good things God must delay in giving us because of what we
are, beings who know that they did not cause themselves to be. Yet, "there
is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied—and that not by lessening
it, but by enlarging it. . . ." If this is what faith teaches us, as it
does, even if we be in the best universities in our time, or at Lancing in
Waugh's time, or in Sussex on All Hallows' Day with Belloc, or in Siena with St.
Catherine, or at Paris with St. Thomas, or at Corinth with Paul, we need to know
what the world is like in which both faith and intelligence can and do exist.
This is why understanding ultimately arrives at something more it wants to hear
because of what it has discovered about itself and the world. This is why faith
seeks understanding, not merely itself.

15 John Paul II, "I Confirm You to Truth," Address to Joint
Assembly of the U. S. Archbishops and the Department Heads of the Roman Curia,
March 11, 1989, The Pope Speaks, 34 (September/October, 1989), pp. 254-55.